R&D Directions survey: Novartis pipeline the most admired

January 28, 2009 – 2:57 pm by Michael Christel

Novartis has won R&D Directions’ Most Admired Pipeline Survey, beating out 24 of its big-pharma competitors in a poll of clinical-trial experts in industry and academia.

With words like “breadth� and “depth� and “diversity� and ‘robust� being used to describe its pipeline, Novartis garnered 20.2% of the total vote, or 68 out of 337 responses. Picking from a list of 25 large drug companies, pollsters were asked whose pipeline they admire the most and why. Schering-Plough finished second, collecting 10.1% of the vote. Rounding out the top five were Roche, Pfizer, and Eli Lilly.

Novartis will be honored as the Most Admired Pipeline at R&D Directions’ Drug Development Summit March 8-11 in Arizona. Recipients of the magazine’s 13th annual top pipeline awards will be recognized as well. Novartis was also selected by R&D Directions’ editors as having the industry’s Best Vaccines Pipeline.

In all, Novartis has 152 projects in clinical development. The Swiss drugmaker filed 14 major regulatory submissions in the United States, Europe, and Japan in 2008. Novartis says its number of new molecular entities being studied has increased 40% since 2005, and there has been a 60% improvement in transition of compounds from proof of concept to confirmatory clinical trial. According to Novartis, biological drugs now represent 25% of the company’s exploratory pipeline.

â€�They seem to have fired the fewest chemists lately and so they may actually have a pipeline in five years,â€� one voter commented on the survey. “And I’ve never worked for them.â€�

In other comments, Novartis was singled out for its work in oncology, vaccines, respiratory disease, and cardiovascular disease. On the vaccines front, Novartis is developing two late-stage candidates in meningitis prevention, and also has several projects targeting Helicobacter pylori, Group B Streptococcus, cytomegalovirus, influenza, and hepatitis C, among other diseases.

Novartis, said one voter, is “researching rare diseases - shows they care for patients, not just profits.�

In oncology, Novartis recently released more promising data for RAD001, also called Afinitor, the company’s hopeful oral kinase inhibitor being investigated in Phase I to III clinical studies in multiple tumor types, including neuroendocrine tumors, renal cell carcinoma, and colorectal, lung, and breast cancers.

“They have the deepest pipe for oncology products,� said one pollster, noting that statistics point to cancer becoming the world’s No. 1 killer by 2012.